The most photogenic array of radio telescopes in the world has also been one of the most productive. Each of the 27 radio telescopes in the Very Large Array (VLA) is the size of a house and can be moved on train tracks. The above pictured VLA, inaugurated in 1980 is situated in New Mexico, USA. The VLA has been used to discover water on planet Mercury, radio-bright coronae around ordinary stars, micro-quasars in our Galaxy, gravitationally-induced Einstein rings around distant galaxies, and radio counterparts to cosmologically distant gamma-ray bursts. The vast size of the VLA has allowed astronomers to study the details of super-fast cosmic jets, and even map the center of our Galaxy. An upgrade of the VLA is being planned.

Here is what the Earth looks like during a solar eclipse. The shadow of the Moon can be seen darkening part of Earth. This shadow moved across the Earth at nearly 2000 kilometers per hour. Only observers near the center of the dark circle see a total solar eclipse - others see a partial eclipse where only part of the Sun appears blocked by the Moon. This spectacular picture of the 1999 August 11 solar eclipse was one of the last ever taken from the Mir space station, which was deorbited in a controlled re-entry in 2001.

As dawn approached on May 8, astronomer Stefan Seip carefully watched Fragment C of broken comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 approach M57 - the Ring Nebula, and faint spiral galaxy IC 1296. Of course, even though the trio seemed to come close together in a truly cosmic photo opportunity, the comet is in the inner part of our solar system, a mere 0.5 light-minutes or so from Seip's telescope located near Stuttgart, Germany, planet Earth. The Ring Nebula (upper right) is more like 2,000 light-years distant, well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. At a distance of 200 million light-years, IC 1296 (between comet and ring) is beyond even the Milky Way's boundaries. Because the comet is so close, it appears to move relatively rapidly against the distant stars. This dramatic telescopic view was composited from two sets of images; one compensating for the comet's apparent motion and one recording the background stars and nebulae.

You're the first spacecraft ever to descend to Titan -- what do you see? Immediately after the Huygen's probe pierced the cloud deck of Saturn's moon Titan last January, it took a unique series of pictures of one of the Solar System's most mysterious moon's. Those pictures have recently been digitally stitched together to create spectacular panoramas and a dramatic descent movie. Pictured above is a panoramic fisheye view Huygen's obtained from about five kilometers above Titan's surface. The digital projection makes the local surface, mostly flat, appear as a ball, but allows one to see in all directions. Huygen's eventual landing site was in the large dark area below, just right of the center. This relatively featureless, dark, sandy basin appears to be surrounded by light colored hills to the right and a landscape fractured by streambeds and canyons above. Recent evidence indicates that Titan's lakebeds and streambeds are usually dry but sometimes filled with a flashflood of liquid methane from rare torrents of methane rain.

Like a butterfly, a white dwarf star begins its life by casting off a cocoon that enclosed its former self. In this analogy, however, the Sun would be a caterpillar and the ejected shell of gas would become the prettiest of all! In the above cocoon, the planetary nebula designated NGC 2440, contains one of the hottest white dwarf stars known. The white dwarf can be seen as the bright dot near the photo's center. Our Sun will eventually become a "white dwarf butterfly", but not for another 5 billion years. The above false color image was post-processed by Forrest Hamilton.

Whoever invented the door sure came up with a sweet name for it.  Door.  Sweet.  I want to invent a new door so I can name it.  I would be a terrible inventor because I don't really give a damn about what I'm inventing...I just want to name it.  I noticed that recent advancements in door technology have not been been accompanied by as cool of a name as the original 'door'.  'Revolving Door'.  Totally unoriginal.  'Trap Door'.  Dude, that's not even a door...its a goddam lid with hinges.  A door, as the name implies, must be situated in a 'doorway'.  I think a hole in the floor is hardly considered a 'doorway'.  Then there is the 'sliding door'.  That's a stinker of a name.  The person who really deserves to be crucified is the guy that invented the 'automatic door'.  This guy went ahead and invented what is unequivically the zenith in door technology and he couldn't come up with anything better than 'automatic door'.  Seriously, he should've invested in a better marketing department.  'Garage Door'.  Totally whatever.  I'm gonna show up all those lame suckers with a new door and I can only hope to rival the pure genius of the original door inventor's name.  My gripe with doors is that I don't want to hold them open for people...unless they're crippled or something.  Then I don't mind.  Unfortunately, 99% of the time I'm holding the door open for someone, they are fully capable of opening the door for themselves.  I only do it because I don't want to be a jerk.  So, my new invention will be a door-like object that will stay open for like thirty seconds so that after I pass through the doorway, I will be too far away to hold it open for someone by the time it closes.  I will name it....Ted. 

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a swirling storm seen for over 300 years, since the beginning of telescopic observations. But in February 2006, planetary imager Christopher Go noticed it had been joined by Red Spot Jr - formed as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the remarkable reddish hue. This sharp Hubble Space Telescope image showing the two salmon-colored Jovian storms was recorded in April. About half the size of the original Red Spot, Red Spot Jr. is similar in diameter to planet Earth. Seen here below and left of the ancient storm system, it trails the Great Red Spot by about an hour as the planet rotates from left to right. While astronomers still don't exactly understand why Jupiter's red spots are red, they do think the appearance of Red Spot Jr. provides evidence for climate change on the Solar System's ruling gas giant.

Are stars better appreciated for their art after they die? Actually, stars usually create their most artistic displays as they die. In the case of low-mass stars like our Sun and M2-9 pictured above, the stars transform themselves from normal stars to white dwarfs by casting off their outer gaseous envelopes. The expended gas frequently forms an impressive display called a planetary nebula that fades gradually over thousand of years. M2-9, a butterfly planetary nebula 2100 light-years away shown in representative colors, has wings that tell a strange but incomplete tale. In the center, two stars orbit inside a gaseous disk 10 times the orbit of Pluto. The expelled envelope of the dying star breaks out from the disk creating the bipolar appearance. Much remains unknown about the physical processes that cause planetary nebulae.

Why is Saturn partly blue? The above picture of Saturn approximates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The above picture was taken in mid-March by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Here Saturn's majestic rings appear directly only as a thin vertical line. The rings show their complex structure in the dark shadows they create on the image left. Saturn's fountain moon Enceladus, only about 500 kilometers across, is seen as the bump in the plane of the rings. The northern hemisphere of Saturn can appear partly blue for the same reason that Earth's skies can appear blue -- molecules in the cloudless portions of both planet's atmospheres are better at scattering blue light than red. When looking deep into Saturn's clouds, however, the natural gold hue of Saturn's clouds becomes dominant. It is not known why southern Saturn does not show the same blue hue -- one hypothesis holds that clouds are higher there. It is also not known why Saturn's clouds are colored gold.

An unusually active sunspot region is now crossing the Sun. The region, numbered 875, is larger than the Earth and has produced several solar flares over the past week. It should take a few more days for Sunspot 875 to finish crossing the solar disk. The above image of the Sun was taken last Wednesday in a very specific color of red light to bring up detail. Sunspot 875, in the midst of erupting a large Class C solar flare, can be seen as the dark region to the upper right. In the above image, relatively cool regions appear dark while hot regions appear bright. On the far left, solar prominences are visible hovering above the Sun's surface.

Good morning everyone!  I think today will be a spectacular day.  Reggae!  I made up a really funny song yesterday about trying to have sex with my friend's girlfriend.  She didn't think it was too funny.  It was a really catchy song though and fun to sing.  I don't think my friend really liked all of the things I was planning to do to his girlfriend either.  It doesn't matter though because I'm a goddam artist and I can take the liberty to offend people to get my message across if that's what it takes.  Speaking of being an artist, New England Watershed magazine e-mailed me about using one of my pictures in an upcoming article.  I'm humbled.  No, wait...I'm not humbled.  I'm too much of a conceited and arrogant prick to be humbled.  Damn, now I have that stupid song I made up stuck in my head.  That is just great. 

Hope everyone has a fantastic day! 

(Content edited because I think my dad reads this...'Hi Dad!'  Nothing to see here!) 

 A new star, likely the brightest supernova in recorded human history, appeared in planet Earth's sky about 1,000 years ago today, in 1006 AD. The expanding debris cloud from the stellar explosion is still visible to modern astronomers, but what did the supernova look like in 1006? In celebration of the millennial anniversary of SN1006, astronomer Tunc Tezel offers this intriguing suggestion, based on a photograph he took on February 22, 1998 from a site overlooking the Mediterranean south of Antalya, Turkey. On that date, bright Venus and a waning crescent Moon shone in the early morning sky. Adopting calculations which put the supernova's apparent brightness between Venus and the crescent Moon, he digitally superposed an appropriate new star in the picture. He placed the star at the supernova's position in the southerly constellation of Lupus and used the water's reflection of moonlight in the final image.

Seemingly adrift in a cosmic sea of stars and glowing gas, the delicate, floating apparition near the center (next to a blue tinted star) of this widefield view is cataloged as NGC 7635 - The Bubble Nebula. A mere 10 light-years wide, the tiny Bubble Nebula and the larger complex of interstellar gas and dust clouds are found about 11,000 light-years distant, straddling the boundary between the parental constellations Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Also included in the breathtaking vista is open star cluster M52 (upper left), some 5,000 light-years away. The digital color picture is based on photographic plates taken at the Palomar Observatory between 1992 and 1997. This cropped version spans about 2.7 degrees on the sky corresponding to a width of just over 500 light-years at the estimated distance of the Bubble Nebula.

Hey Joe, thought this might interest you and possibly send you into a tizzy.  Tizzy.  Anyways, one of our lawyers is representing this guy being detained at Gitmo.  Fucking horribly sad story. 

Saddiq Story

Here's an excerpt:

I brought flowers to the isolation cell when I visited Saddiq this month. He likes to draw roses and often asks for gardening magazines.

Saddiq is one of the many mistakes at Guantanamo Bay. In 2005 our military admitted that he was not an enemy combatant, but the government hasn't been able to repatriate him. (By a curious irony, Saddiq's opposition to Osama bin Laden makes him too hot to handle in his native Saudi Arabia.) So he lives behind razor wire in Camp Iguana, with eight other men whom the military cleared long ago but who are nevertheless forbidden newspapers, visits from loved ones, English-language dictionaries -- and flowers.

....

When our meeting was over, the flowers had wilted. Saddiq picked up the little nosegay. "May I take these back to Camp Iguana?"

But flowers are contraband. He wasn't allowed to keep them.

In many cosmic environments, when material falls toward a black hole energy is produced as some of the matter is blasted back out in jets. In fact, such black hole "engines" appear to be the most efficient in the Universe, at least on a galactic scale. This composite image illustrates one example of an elliptical galaxy with an efficient black hole engine, NGC 4696. The large galaxy is the brightest member of the Centaurus galaxy cluster, some 150 million light-years away. Exploring NGC 4696 in x-rays (red) astronomers can measure the rate at which infalling matter fuels the supermassive black hole and compare it to the energy output in the jets to produce giant radio emitting bubbles. The bubbles, shown here in blue, are about 10,000 light-years across. The results confirm that the process is much more efficient than producing energy through nuclear reactions - not to mention using fossil fuels. Astronomers also suggest that as the black hole pumps out energy and heats the surrounding gas, star formation is ultimately shut off, limiting the size of large galaxies like NGC 4696.

Why is the image of Cassiopeia A changing? Two images of the nearby supernova remnant taken a year apart in infrared light appear to show outward motions at tremendous speeds. This was unexpected since the supernova that created the picturesque nebula was seen 325 years ago. The reason is likely light echoes. Light from the supernova heated up distant ambient dust that is just beginning to show its glow. As time goes by, more distant dust lights up, giving the appearance of outward motion. The above image is a composite of X-ray, optical, and infrared light exposures that have been digitally combined. The infrared light image was taken by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope and was used in the discovery of the light echo. The portion of Cassiopeia A shown spans about 15 light years and lies 10,000 light years away toward the constellation of Cassiopeia.